MOSCOW - Russia vowed on Wednesday to retaliate against what it called "unfounded" US sanctions imposed a day earlier on 12 Russians for human rights abuses, including allegedly denying medical care to a whistleblowing lawyer who died in a Russian prison.

The United States did not link the sanctions - which expand a list of individuals targeted in 2012 over lawyer Sergei Magnitsky's death - to those imposed by Washington this year over Moscow's annexation of Crimea and unrest in eastern Ukraine. (Reuters)